Jewish Databases from Aleppo, Syria

Record keeping by the government in many of areas where Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews lived simply didn’t exist before the 1920s. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after WWI, the new governments in those areas began to keep records of things like births and marriages, but how does one research family events that occurred earlier? The short answer is, unfortunately, with difficultly. Since the governments did not systemically keep track of events, you must look to the local Jewish communities and their own records, if they exist.

That said, one of the more interesting projects to assist a specific community with family research is the Sephardic Heritage Project, which has indexed a number of important collections of vital records from Aleppo, Syria, including:

Aleppo Marriage Database – 1354 records – For the most part, the data covers 1847-1850, 1868-1877, and 1893-1934. However, we included a few records found in 1811and 1855 that were derived from Ketubot manuscripts.

This effort has been led by Sarina Roffé, who founded the project in 2004, and had overseen the collection and translation of records in Israel and New York. You can read Sarina’s description of the Aleppo Jewish community in her JewishGen article The Jews of Aleppo.